Connecting the on-chain ecosystem, holding the AI trump card.

Written by: 0x_Zhuang

Translated by: Plain Blockchain

A month and a half ago, I started heavily investing in $NEAR.

Some people asked me why I was able to discover it ahead of the recent surge in attention? Looking back, my investment analysis framework has always been relatively simple:

Narrative, Fundamentals, and the team/hosts behind it.

I once believed that NEAR was one of the few projects that could almost fully encompass these three elements, but after deepening my research on its latest developments, my confidence has become even stronger.

I gradually realized that NEAR is definitely not just another ordinary L1 competing for liquidity.

It is positioning itself as the underlying infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI), privacy, and cross-chain finance, and I believe the market is currently underestimating its value seriously.

The reasons are as follows:

1. The narrative is beginning to integrate deeply

I initially became interested in NEAR because it touched on the two strongest narratives in the crypto space: privacy and AI.

With the strong return of $ZEC, NEAR Intents has become one of the core channels for cross-chain ZEC liquidity; when I initially conducted research, its volume of processed ZEC transactions had already surpassed $2.2 billion.

Today, leveraging Confidential Intents and its integration with Hyperliquid, NEAR is making inroads into privacy-focused perpetual contract trading.

Bitwise's latest research report also pointed out that confidential intents account for over 50% of the total held value in the Intents protocol. Privacy is no longer just a verbal narrative; real spot buying demand has taken shape.

2. Every chain will become an L2 for NEAR

This is the most intriguing part of the entire investment logic.

While other blockchains are still internally competing for users and on-chain liquidity, NEAR is building the infrastructure that connects them all.

Robinhood Chain recently completed integration with NEAR Intents and near.com, enabling seamless cross-chain transactions across more than 30 networks and over 180 assets.

Along with Hyperliquid perpetual contracts and Ondo's tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, users no longer need to be concerned about which blockchain they are currently on; they can directly access crypto assets, traditional stocks, and derivatives. NEAR essentially abstracts away the underlying blockchain.

It no longer competes with various public chain ecosystems but continues to benefit through empowering interconnection. Admittedly, mere ecological integration cannot directly guarantee profits, but this pattern is far grander than the ordinary L1 purely competing for TVL.

3. On-chain fundamental data has fully exploded

When I first began accumulating, the cumulative processing volume of NEAR Intents was around $25 billion. According to my latest on-chain snapshot:

• Cumulative transaction volume exceeds $33 billion
• Transaction volume in the past 30 days reached $4.76 billion
• Intents locked value (TVL) surpassed $223 million
• Cumulative total fees exceeded $53 million
• Fees captured in the past 30 days reached $7.28 million
• Net income in the past 30 days reached $2.15 million

At the current annualized operating rate calculated over the past 30 days, total annualized fees are around $87 million, and annualized net income is about $26 million.

For a project that is still generally regarded as an ordinary L1 by the market, this performance is already quite impressive. With near.com launching a function that combines spot trading, perpetual contracts, and wallets based on Intents, the ecosystem has added another powerful entry point for customer acquisition and fee capture.

User growth → Amplified transaction volume → Increased earnings → Enhanced potential token buybacks This is precisely the growth flywheel that I highly value.

4. The token economics model has become more attractive

This may be one of the most underestimated catalysts in the entire investment logic.

NEAR has halved its annual token inflation rate from 5% to 2.5%, directly reducing the new issuance by 50%.

Since February, the fees distributed to NEAR from the Intents protocol have been directly used for secondary market repurchases of $NEAR, and there is currently a proposal underway to further reduce the annual inflation rate to 1.6%.

Lower inflation, continuously growing protocol revenue, and token buybacks driven by real income.

5. Decentralized AI may be the biggest potential opportunity

Currently, the vast majority of AI tokens in the crypto space are still stuck in the pure concept hype stage, with very few projects tightly binding real AI applications with token utility.

NEAR is very likely to become the exception that breaks the mold.

Its co-founder @ilblackdragon is one of the co-authors of the groundbreaking paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which propelled the emergence of modern large language models.

Today, NEAR AI is building a decentralized computing network with privacy reasoning. Its logic is very pure: breaking the complete dependence on centralized cloud giants by allowing independent GPU computing nodes to contribute computing power to the network.

NEAR AI's Confidential GPU Marketplace leverages trusted execution environments (TEEs) to protect AI tasks and data, and verifies the authenticity of the operating environment through hardware authentication.

NEAR defines this as the first TEE secure computing network designed specifically for enterprise and government-level AI tasks.

Decentralized computing itself is not uncommon, but combining independent computing nodes with confidential, verifiable execution mechanisms offers immense imaginative potential.

And this is where blockchain can truly demonstrate its value:

Coordinating independent computing nodes, payment settlements, staking, and economic incentives without the need for centralized managers.

Currently, even Venice ($VVV) has integrated NEAR AI's confidential reasoning infrastructure.

More importantly, NEAR AI has introduced a token-staking-based reasoning and AI Agent custody access.

Users only need to stake $NEAR to continuously receive AI computing power allocations while retaining ownership of the staked tokens.

This grants NEAR a new substantial source of token demand beyond transaction fees and investment hype.

6. The launch of Bitwise ETF and historical endorsement

On September 29, Bitwise officially launched the first U.S. NEAR spot ETF (code: $NRR) and released an in-depth investment research report titled “NEAR in Plain English” on October 7.

The logic behind it is very clear and intuitive: the crypto ecosystem is highly fragmented across hundreds of independent blockchains, while AI computing power is increasingly monopolized by centralized giants; NEAR Intents addresses the fragmentation of inter-chain liquidity, while NEAR AI is building a verifiable private AI foundation.

The two combined, NEAR is expected to ultimately become the core execution layer for autonomously operating AI Agents.

Also worth noting is Bitwise's outstanding historical performance in operating crypto ETFs: $BITB — Bitcoin ETF launched in January 2024, ranked among the top 25 ETFs in history to surpass $1 billion AUM the fastest, with assets exceeding $2 billion within approximately two months.

As of October 2026, AUM reached about $3.1 billion. $BSOL — Solana Staking ETF launched in October 2025, breached $500 million AUM just 18 trading days after launch.

As of October 2026, AUM reached approximately $1.2 billion. $NRR — NEAR ETF launched on September 29, 2026, early AUM reached about $60 million, providing exposure to spot NEAR risk and includes a staking yield component.

Although AUM is not entirely equivalent to net inflow, the popularity of past products cannot fully guarantee that NEAR will replicate the same trajectory.

However, Bitwise's ability to attract traditional funds into crypto assets has been repeatedly validated.

Today, institutional investors have a formal U.S. stock market channel to directly invest in NEAR without complex wallet management or self-custody.

I believe this will be a significant long-term catalyst.

7. The risk-reward ratio still shows high asymmetry

This is probably the aspect I am most optimistic about.

AI startups that have validated product-market fit (PMF) and generated stable income often have valuations in the hundreds of billions in the primary market.

In contrast, NEAR's market capitalization hovers around $5 billion.

Imagine a project that combines: AI underlying infrastructure, confidential reasoning, decentralized computing, cross-chain settlements, tokenized real-world assets, and a real buyback mechanism.

Clearly, crypto tokens cannot be directly equated with equity in AI companies.

But if NEAR can effectively capture the enormous demand brought by AI computing power and cross-chain financial settlements, I believe the market's pricing logic towards it will undergo a fundamental change.

Especially when most market participants still view it as just another ordinary L1.

8. Finally, let's see who stands behind it

As early as this July, I listened to an hour-long episode of Mert's WSH podcast, where he mentioned three positions he was focusing on at the time: $ZEC, $SOL, and lastly, the dark horse he viewed as $NEAR.

At that time, almost no one in the market had their eyes on this. Just a few months have passed:

• Naval started retweeting NEAR-related posts.
• Mert has repeatedly expressed bullish views in public.
• Robinhood Chain, Hyperliquid, and Ondo have successively connected to NEAR's financial system, with more integrations on the way.
• Bitwise has directly launched a spot ETF and published detailed bullish research reports.

I never follow blindly just because well-known figures are bullish.

However, when narrative, fundamentals, token economics, and traditional institutional funding channels resonate simultaneously, the signal is already quite clear.

Final Thoughts

Many people have asked me where my confidence came from to significantly increase my position over a month ago.

My investment philosophy has always been very clear: once I have done thorough research and built a sufficiently strong conviction, the only remaining factors are the timing of entry and position management.

As long as the logic is closed-loop and the conviction is strong, I will completely block out external noise and decisively build large positions through dollar-cost averaging (DCA) with limit orders. As long as the core logic has not been disproven, I can completely withstand a 50% paper drawdown, but I would never want to miss out on a potential cross-cycle surge that could change my financial standing.

A month and a half ago, I decisively bought NEAR at an average price of around $2 because I saw multiple core narratives beginning to converge here. Now, my bullish sentiment has become even stronger because its fundamentals, product implementations, and token economics are realizing at a visibly fast pace.

AI, privacy, DeFi, continuously growing revenue, token buybacks, halved inflation, and opened institutional funding channels—all positive factors have formed a perfect closed loop within the same ecosystem.

The market still only values it as an ordinary L1, but its future ceiling is much broader.

The stars are aligning, and we are still in the early stages.